Cultural and historical inventory of Arbottna Manor 70 km south of Stockholm. With Annika Jägerholm, curator at the City Museum. 93 pages published report, graphic designed by Art Director Sakari Paananen.

The Royal Castle in Stockholm is not a provincial copy. It is pure and true Italian Baroque. The architect; Nicodemus Tessin worked and studied with Lorenzo Bernini in Rome. And yet it is unmistakingly swedish in its rational structure. Maybe that is a result of the constant struggle between the architect and the commissionaire. The ascetic king, Karl XII had little taste for domestic comfort. He preferred to sleep in tent with his men on the battlefield. He demanded Tessin many times to keep it more simple (and save money). But when he refused to listen (and got the funds) the architect fulfilled a grandiose baroque vision for a Super-power soon to be ceased.
Selection published in RUM #151 September 2014.

The property owner Einar Mattsson has a long history in real estate business. Including collecting art, sometimes as a way to receive income from poor artists. Collection shot at the company headquarters at Rosenlundsgatan 58 in Stockholm. Catalogue with graphic design by Henrik Nygren and cover by Jesper Waldersten.

In front of Grand Hotel Stockholm, Marge Architects placed a group of four bronze plated pavilions where you can get a ticket for a boat tour or a cup of coffee. Also used as storage for the traffic to Stockholm archipelago, the challenge was to interact with historic buildings in the heart of the city. Captured in late warm summer 2013.

The ultimate documentation of Artur von Schmalensee´s modernistic masterpiece from 1963. The Kiruna Town Hall will soon be demolished when LKAB company expands their underground mines. Like entire city of Kiruna, this building is cracking from dynamite blasts 1500 meters below ground surface. In just a few years the city centre will be transformed into gravel and dust. Eventually it will rise in a different place. Form magazine #2 2013. Text by Po Tidholm.

Post war Architecture by Fritz Jaenecke and Sten Samuelson. Commercially successful but artistically neglected they practically built everything in south Sweden during the “golden ages”. The older, Fritz Jaenecke (1903-1978) escaped nazi Germany when Albert Speer noted him as “not reliable”. Together with the much younger Sten Samuelson (1926-2002) they formed a creative team, responsible for some very powerful exponents of Modernism and early Post Modernism. Coming book at Trema Publishing.

At home with Sven-Harry Karlsson, building contractor and art mecenat. The 1800th century original on which a life size replica was based and built on top of his own museum. Form Magazine #2 2011. Text by Daniel Golling.

Forum No.2 2009; Magazine for Scandinavian Architecture, Interiors and Design. New release with art direction by Henrik Nygren. Covering the Bank of Sweden, a masterpiece by Peter Celsing from 1976. Text by Wilfried Wang.

Fashion Tale Magazine; I intended to predict the future. A future, we may fear, is not sunny. It´s probably wet, cloudy and very near. Sometimes excessively hot too. So was model; Natalia Khutkubia from Tiblisi, Georgia.
In that future, will there be any Caucasians, fashion stylists with dogs or water to drink?
Styling Martin Bergstrom.

One hundred and eighty-eight pages of design by CKR. Objects lined up in New York, Milan, Stockholm, Tibro and elsewhere. Placed on a horizontal line as a superior principle of representational order. Mark Isitt writes a biography of Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune.

Signed “W.Germany”, “Import” or “#13” this pottery is mass-produced. Occasionally Danish hand-crafted or Swedish amateur works. In rare cases pieces by known artists. This is a homage to Cezanne, Morandi and Robert Mapplethorpe. As well as generations of art students struggling with shadows, shapes and forms of a “Nature Morte” consisting of randomly collected items, put together by a teacher in messy hair and corduroy, suggesting he is true believer of ART. Book project, text by Lars O. Ericsson.

Flat scans of handmade fibre based photographic prints on papers not longer available on the market. With names like; Fortezo, Geavatone, Verdita or Ilfobrom they remind us of a lost world of silver halogenide abundance.

“As early as 1764 Immanuel Kant suggests the esthetic field of taste is, like a day, divided into two halves. The bright beauty of sunshine and the pale gleam of a sublime moon. On one hand the light pleasant positive Beauty, on the other the dangerous frightening majestic Sublime, rousing negative emotions close to dread and discomfort”.

Philosopher Pierre Guillet de Montoux in a text, accompanied the images in “SvD City” magazine January 1997.

The story was created with Bo Brinkenfalk when a debate about values in fashion (again) turned into moral panic. Fashion artists and photographers were blamed for causing eating disorders and other traumas. The publication resulted in death threats and invitations to talk-shows. Leading to nothing, but a recognition 10 years later of overweight as a potentially bigger health problem.

“The Metro was one of the most significant architectural manifestations during the twentieth century. The aesthetic and social pathos of modernism expressed in a transport machinery. Transit and travel charged with not only a practical meaning; a metaphysical hope of a better life.

At the same time as the ideology of an epoch is unduly obtrusive in the pale fluorescent light of Metro underworld, I sense an end of an illusion and it´s social model”.

My contribution to political activism. An attempt to eliminate a nuclear power plant built exactly on the same location as my childhood paradise. Eventually I succeeded as the plant closed in 2005. With help from Maria and Claes.

“My father had a darkroom, a closet full of peculiar things I started to play with. I soon became addicted to developers, fixers and the sensation when the images sprung out of them. The first pictures was from desolate buildings and over the years, my devotion to architecture, photography and artistic expression has not changed”.

Johan Fowelin got his first formal education at Christer Strömholm photographic school in 1975. After travel in Germany, Holland, France and Italy he was employed by Södertälje Konsthall 1976-82. In 1982 he started his own business combining photography with studies in art and architecture at Stockholm University. In 1985 he worked with artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd in Lausanne and 1989 he was appointed by University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. From which he examined with a masters degree in photography 1991.

Since then Johan Fowelin has been working with photography and writing in the field of art, architecture and advertising. With a traditional and yet contemporary expression and strong artistic integrity. He is commissioned by architects, galleries, publishers, agencies and institutions, nationally and internationally.